Short Takes

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This lively collection of fifty-three short, readable selections by both student and professional writers provides useful models of the rhetorical modes. In addition to familiar names such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Rodriguez, and William Raspberry, this reader features many fresh voices such as Anchee Min, Thomas Sowell, Anna Quindlen, Michael Chabon, and Dave Barry. Detailed chapter openers offer strategies for using each rhetorical mode, including short examples from the readings within each chapter. Headnotes for each essay give a brief biography of its author, explain its context, and pinpoint one of the writer’s techniques. Questions on “Organization and Ideas” and “Technique and Style” and many suggestions for writing journal entries and essays follow each selection. Each chapter ends with additional writing assignments that ask students to compare two or more of the essays.

Freeze Frame: Reading and Writing

Chapter 1: Description and Narration

Lori Jakiela, “You’ll Love the Way We Fly”

*Ellen A. Laird, Prime Suspect, Second Row Center

Kelly Ruth Winter, "Tommy”

Mary Roach, “A Terrible Thing to Waste: You Do Not Need Brains To Go To The Harvard Brain Bank, Only A Brain”